Benjamin Schwarz: Gentrification and Its Discontents in Manhattan
[Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor.]
Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. Zukin’s Naked City does make forays into the white-hot center of hipness, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, and to rapidly gentrifying Harlem. But the bulk of her book, and all of Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, is confined to fine-grained observations of the streets and neighborhoods within roughly 20 blocks of their apartments in Greenwich Village—that is, west to the Village’s Meatpacking District and new Gold Coast along West Street, east to the fringes of Alphabet City, north to Union Square, and south to SoHo and Tribeca. This area today is in every sense rarefied, and for most of its history was in crucial ways set apart from the rest of Manhattan, which to some extent leaped beyond it. Still, the precedent for using the Village to draw lessons and issue prescriptions about New York generally, and indeed urban life writ large, was of course sanctified in 1961 by that doughty urban observer and community activist, Jane Jacobs. She largely formed her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the ur-text for contemporary writing about urban life and the most influential American book ever written about cities—by closely reading the neighborhood life around her house on Hudson Street (about six blocks from Sorkin’s apartment and, by my reckoning, about 10 from Zukin’s; it’s all a bit clubby)....
Inevitably, behind cries of decline is a conception, conscious or not, of a time and situation that was better—when the city had a soul. In her invocations of laundries and shoe-repair and hardware stores, Zukin betrays a vague nostalgia, shared by many chronicles of New York (Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Ric Burns’s documentary New York, Pete Hamill’s memoirs), for the Old Neighborhoods characteristic of what was once an overwhelmingly working-class city. As late as 1950, New York was by far the world’s largest industrial center, and even Manhattan was predominantly and the Village largely a center for labor. There were sewing rooms and small-scale manufacturing lofts in the east-central Village, SoHo, and Tribeca (where, in the late 1970s, I worked in a belt-and-handbag factory); the far West Village had a working waterfront (New York’s port was easily the world’s largest, employing 200,000 people) and a brewery (New York made one-fifth of the world’s beer). Even if Zukin and Sorkin bemoan the city’s deindustrialization and are wistful for the higgledy-piggledy way manufacturing was scattered throughout New York (diversity! mixed use!), they’re compelled to make clear that they don’t miss the sweatshops and the exploitative, horrible life that went with them. And recall that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in the heart of the Village on a block fronting Washington Square, burned in the second decade of the 20th century—only 25 years before Mary McCarthy, 35 years before the Abstract Expressionists and the Beats, and 45 years before NYU student Woody Allen would all be strolling the square. Which means that even hazy melancholy for the New York of regular Joes with lunch pails returning after a good day’s work to their neighborhoods of kids playing stickball and corner drugstores dispensing egg creams can only evoke scenes pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration.
While Sorkin, Zukin, and seemingly everyone else misses the relics of that lost city, such as its dense network of mostly mediocre neighborhood bakeries—relics that, thanks to the uneven and arrested economic development imposed by the Depression, war, postwar decline, and fiscal crisis, were a familiar aspect of the streetscape of much of Manhattan into the 1980s—the city of the old neighborhoods was really an agglomeration of mostly self-sufficient, inward-looking, lower-middle-class communities. (Even as young marrieds, my French-Canadian grandmother and Korean grandfather, neither of whom ever mastered English, largely confined themselves to the few blocks of their upper Manhattan neighborhood.) To many modern celebrants of urban life, the Manhattan of the 1940s seems, as Zukin acknowledges, a far less “interesting” place—a less hip, thrumming, and worldly place—than the contemporary borough. While some poor and rich communities were in shocking proximity—the slaughterhouses and shanties of Turtle Bay, until they were cleared for the construction of the UN headquarters, essentially abutted the grand residences of Beekman Place—there wasn’t much of the kind of lively intermingling of classes or even ethnicities that Zukin’s description might evoke....
Confronted with this unstoppable process, Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. Zukin’s Naked City does make forays into the white-hot center of hipness, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, and to rapidly gentrifying Harlem. But the bulk of her book, and all of Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, is confined to fine-grained observations of the streets and neighborhoods within roughly 20 blocks of their apartments in Greenwich Village—that is, west to the Village’s Meatpacking District and new Gold Coast along West Street, east to the fringes of Alphabet City, north to Union Square, and south to SoHo and Tribeca. This area today is in every sense rarefied, and for most of its history was in crucial ways set apart from the rest of Manhattan, which to some extent leaped beyond it. Still, the precedent for using the Village to draw lessons and issue prescriptions about New York generally, and indeed urban life writ large, was of course sanctified in 1961 by that doughty urban observer and community activist, Jane Jacobs. She largely formed her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the ur-text for contemporary writing about urban life and the most influential American book ever written about cities—by closely reading the neighborhood life around her house on Hudson Street (about six blocks from Sorkin’s apartment and, by my reckoning, about 10 from Zukin’s; it’s all a bit clubby)....
Inevitably, behind cries of decline is a conception, conscious or not, of a time and situation that was better—when the city had a soul. In her invocations of laundries and shoe-repair and hardware stores, Zukin betrays a vague nostalgia, shared by many chronicles of New York (Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Ric Burns’s documentary New York, Pete Hamill’s memoirs), for the Old Neighborhoods characteristic of what was once an overwhelmingly working-class city. As late as 1950, New York was by far the world’s largest industrial center, and even Manhattan was predominantly and the Village largely a center for labor. There were sewing rooms and small-scale manufacturing lofts in the east-central Village, SoHo, and Tribeca (where, in the late 1970s, I worked in a belt-and-handbag factory); the far West Village had a working waterfront (New York’s port was easily the world’s largest, employing 200,000 people) and a brewery (New York made one-fifth of the world’s beer). Even if Zukin and Sorkin bemoan the city’s deindustrialization and are wistful for the higgledy-piggledy way manufacturing was scattered throughout New York (diversity! mixed use!), they’re compelled to make clear that they don’t miss the sweatshops and the exploitative, horrible life that went with them. And recall that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, in the heart of the Village on a block fronting Washington Square, burned in the second decade of the 20th century—only 25 years before Mary McCarthy, 35 years before the Abstract Expressionists and the Beats, and 45 years before NYU student Woody Allen would all be strolling the square. Which means that even hazy melancholy for the New York of regular Joes with lunch pails returning after a good day’s work to their neighborhoods of kids playing stickball and corner drugstores dispensing egg creams can only evoke scenes pretty much limited to the years of the LaGuardia administration.
While Sorkin, Zukin, and seemingly everyone else misses the relics of that lost city, such as its dense network of mostly mediocre neighborhood bakeries—relics that, thanks to the uneven and arrested economic development imposed by the Depression, war, postwar decline, and fiscal crisis, were a familiar aspect of the streetscape of much of Manhattan into the 1980s—the city of the old neighborhoods was really an agglomeration of mostly self-sufficient, inward-looking, lower-middle-class communities. (Even as young marrieds, my French-Canadian grandmother and Korean grandfather, neither of whom ever mastered English, largely confined themselves to the few blocks of their upper Manhattan neighborhood.) To many modern celebrants of urban life, the Manhattan of the 1940s seems, as Zukin acknowledges, a far less “interesting” place—a less hip, thrumming, and worldly place—than the contemporary borough. While some poor and rich communities were in shocking proximity—the slaughterhouses and shanties of Turtle Bay, until they were cleared for the construction of the UN headquarters, essentially abutted the grand residences of Beekman Place—there wasn’t much of the kind of lively intermingling of classes or even ethnicities that Zukin’s description might evoke....
Confronted with this unstoppable process, Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience....